


Forgive us our Trespasses

by Roswellian



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angel Matt, Blind Character, Body Horror, F/F, Graphic Depictions of Illness, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, What-If
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-04
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-03-29 00:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3875905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roswellian/pseuds/Roswellian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." Mathew 10:34</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Episode 1: Out of Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> There are several important things to note before you begin reading.  
> Firstly, I tried to depict Catholic mythos and imagery with the greatest grace and respect possible, however I was not raised with the Church as many are. Also sometimes things are flubbed in order to tell a good story. If I have offended I deeply apologize. Feel free to comment and/or message me with suggestions.  
> Secondly, I am severely dyslexic and do not have a beta at this time so there will be errors. I am happy to field constructive criticism or specific spelling fixes, but DO NOT COMMENT TELLING ME THAT THERE ARE ERRORS OR TO GET A BETA.  
> Lastly, if you enjoyed this please consider dropping me a line at roswell-talk.tumblr.com and or recommending this fic to a friend. I am always happy to answer questions or to talk to anybody. Also if you wish me to see anything you can always tag it roswelltalk.

**Friday**

Angels are blind, because justice is blind and they are God’s justice.

This is what Matt will tell Foggy much later when everything is out in the open and getting sorted out.

The real reason is both much more complicated and much more mundane than that. Angels were not made to see the world in the same way people do, with eyes that is. Their great and terrifying, formless and ever shifting faces do not bare eyes. Either that or they bare too many. Eyes that shift and scrape against each other, that provide a picture of the world that is more motion and more approximation than reality.

Angles see, of course they see. They see shapes and ideas. They see faith and goodness and truth burning like fire. They see the things that eat people from the inside out and they see sorrow. They see eventualities and they see paths and possibilities. They just don’t see the same as humans.

This is what Matt discovers once he is done falling. He is very suddenly inside a body with eyes that he does not know what to do with. He can feel them inside his skull, pressing against his eyelids, and boy is that a strange feeling. Not that being something other than an angel isn’t all weird feelings but he wants to scratch his eyes out because his sight is burning them. All the things angels are made to see sear his newly given retinas until there is nothing.

Except that everything hurts.

Everything pushes against him. Muscle and bone and skin. Human bodies are so confining. He is used to being expansive. He is used to pushing against things, like walls and ceilings. He is used to scraping his wings against the branches of towering trees. He is used to not having borders, to not having a definitive end to what is him. He is not used to things pushing in on him, not nearly so close as this.

Later he will wonder if he cut’s himself open if everything he used to be will spill out. Then he’ll get cut with a knife and he’ll bleed blood and he’ll still be human and that will answer that question.

He closes his eyes and discovers for the first time what sleep is because he really does feel truly terrible.

A young man peered at the fallen angel from behind a dumpster. He hadn’t watched him fall. Falling for angels is not the thing it is for humans. Heaven isn’t a place you can fall from. It just sort of is. That is why when an angel falls it is more like crashing through thing. Through worlds. Through things that tug and scratch and through hands that grab and tear. It is for the angel an eternity, only to suddenly, painfully arrive in a body as if you had always been there.

The young man who did not watch him fall but who definitely watched him attempt to claw his own eyes out steps forward only when his arms finally fall to his side and his breathing evens to something that might be mistaken for peaceful.

He kneels beside the man and pulls his jacket off. The cold air fresh on his skin should make him break out in gooseflesh, but a man just appeared in his alleyway so he already has the heebie-jeebies. He pulls his jacket over pale, new flesh, and over wings he just watched _grow._

Then he goes to get Claire.

He doesn’t mention the wings.

Claire as worked as a nurse long enough to know that you treat the dying and the maybe dying with reverence. The man in the alley that Julio had taken her to is certainly trying to die. So she makes her fingers soft as she lifts his gums to see what is tearing at his bleeding lips. Lion’s teeth and snake’s teeth mingle there and sprout in multitudes from his gums. They grow and multiply even as she watches. He may look like a man, she thinks, but he is also a creature. Something inhuman lays before her.

This is what Claire realizes squatting there in the grime.

She throws up the bile building in the throat. She wipes her mouth with a shaking hand. He gathers him in arms she makes soft so as not to jostle him. Julio will not touch him, not again, but he rushes ahead of her opening doors and whispering that the coast was clear. He disappears as soon as she has the man settled on her couch.

She wishes she could disappear too.

She doesn’t.

This is what Claire see when she steels herself enough to peel the coat from him; wings. Expansive hawk’s wings. Wings which drip with blood and shiver in the air. She puts her hands on the man’s chest and tries desperately not to scream. Her neighbors wouldn’t appreciate it.

The thing on her couch jolts awake then with her hands on his chest like defibrillator. He doesn’t scream. She thought he might, but his waking is as quiet as it is sudden.

(It’s awakening? Claire can’t quite decide on whether this stranger is a he or an it, a man or a monster. She carried him in her arms and she think that he might be as good as human. Then she sees the scales that are pushing their way through the skin of its throat and it is back to being a creature.)

“Stay still,” Claire says in part because she is a nurse and he is her patient and she needs him still. But she also says it because she does not want those teeth any nearer her than absolutely necessary.

“Where am I?” He says. He sounds terrified and his eyes don’t move.

(Claire settles in that moment on he. Monsters are rarely this human and if he is indeed a monster, which she thinks is quite likely, he should be rewarded for the effort of at least dressing up as a human.)

“Where am I?” the stranger asks again. He pushes against her hands until he is sitting upright. He wings trail after him like wake after a boat, limp and twisted.

“Who are you?” He says.

“The lucky girl who carried your ass out of the alleyway,” Clair says.

“I’ve got to get out of here.” He says.

He stumbles up but stops to spit out teeth. His hands are full of them. They spill between his fingers and fall in constellations on the ground. One fang breaks it’s self against the ground. Others are full of rot when they had been pristine and shining when Claire had looked that them but an hour before. He spits out a few more and she realizes she is actually witnessing the process of decay.

“If you want to leave,” she says, “I can’t stop you. But I’m a nurse, I can patch up you and your… your wings.”

“Do not worry about them,” the monster in her kitchen says, “they will rot off in a few days.”

“Bone doesn’t rot.” The words stick in her throat, and she has to force the out through clenched teeth.

“My wings aren’t bone, not really.” He says as if that settles it. As if Claire can’t see the bones jutting and bruised beneath his feathers.

“Wings don’t rot.” She says again, firmer, “not when blood is still flowing in them.”

“It will happen, trust me.” Says the man in her kitchen, “I have seen it happen to my brothers and sisters, it will happen to me.”

“And who are those brothers and sisters?”

“Fallen Angels,” He says.

**Saturday**

Claire wakes from uncertain dreams, which cling to her brain like mist, to find the angel on her fire escape. His feathers are falling from his wings and dancing on the wind as they float off into the city. He grabs at one or two and they slip through his fingers.

“It’s a beautiful morning.” She says, “I suppose I doesn’t compare to heaven, though.” The word heaven caught in her throat like the word rot had the night before. She didn’t believe in heaven, nor in hell. She did not see devils cast themselves in her path. She had stitched too many wounds and held the hands of too many of the dying to believe in anything but the beating of hearts, the fragility of flesh, and the cruelty of men. She didn’t believe in heaven, but it’s hard not to believe in angels when you are stitching an unconscious one together and you can feel his wings beneath your hands.

That is what Claire discovered as she dragged him to the couch from where he had passed out again against her wall. That is what Claire contemplated as she picked up the fangs of half a dozen different creatures from where they spilled out across her floor. She used tongs because she was unsure if the more wicked looking ones might be full of venom, and she placed them in an ash tray she still had from when she used to room with a smoker in med school because she had a vague certainty that you shouldn’t throw out the teeth off angels.

“I wouldn’t know.” The angel chuckles.

“You do know what heaven looks like, don’t you? You’re not one of those lowly messengers angels who never got see heaven, are you?” It would be just Claire’s luck to be stuck with a terrifying monstrous angel and have him not even be one of the cool ones.

“Well heaven isn’t exactly a place and it can’t really be compared to anything on earth, but I was more talking about the being blind thing.” He turned his head and she gets her first good look at his eyes. There are beautiful and terrifying. His irises seem to drip into his pupils like tears of ancient red-gold amber and the white of his eyes are sooty and scorched. His eyes are horror and fire and blood and they definitely do not focus on Claire, and instead rest on something past her, something she is sure she will not see if she turns around.

“If I ever want you out of my apartment I’m going to have to buy you glasses aren’t I?” Claire sighs. The angel looks confused. “You don’t know what your eye’s look like do you?”

“I’m afraid not.” He says, and his smile is sad.

“They’re like fire being consumed by a black hole.” She says, “Very scary. Do you want breakfast?”

It’s cereal because Claire can’t even cook eggs without burning them. It’s sugary and multi colored and very human. Claire wants to laugh at the sights of his sharp monster teeth trying to get all the bits into his mouth or at how he can never quite get the spoon back in the bowl on the first try. _There is an angel in my kitchen_ , she thinks, _and he is making faces at how children’s cereal tastes_. It’s a little sad though, what he looks like when one of his fangs falls from his lips and lands in the milk.

“What’s your name?” She says trying to be kind, when he had talked of the fate of hiss wings the day before she had thought him indifferent. He cared, she could see that now, but she was not good at comfort for all that she was a nurse. They called her when a patient needed a push or when they needed someone no nonsense to tell them the real story. She knew how to make her hands soft and how to treat the sick with respect and sometimes reverence.

This is the kind of thing Claire doesn’t know how to fix.

“It wouldn’t mean anything to you.” He frowns, a small indent forming in his forehead.

“I have to call you something.”

The angel opens his mouth and what comes out is not English. It is not any language that she has ever heard. It burns her ears and courses through her veins and makes her want to scream. He closes her eyes and covers her ears because the sound, the name, lasts only a second but she can still hear it echoing inside her.

When she opens her eyes the angel’s mouth is a frowning gash in his face. He looks like he is about to cry. “I can’t pronounce it right anymore.”

“It sounds fine to me,” Claire says barely able to speak after that rending cacophony of a name. “But do you have something more human?”

“Human?” He hums a little as he thinks, “If my name were spoken in a human tongue it would be Mahiel.”

“I’m going to call you Matthew.”

“Okay.” says the newly named Matt, looking a little defeated.

**Midnight**

He throws up black bile in her toilet. His hands shake. He can’t keep anything down. Even the glass of warm water she hands him seems to burn his throat. The tips of his wings are crumbling into ash on the tile. His is a body gone to wreck and ruin like some ancient and long forgotten building. They will find statues of us in the forest someday, Claire thinks. They will be surrounded by the dust of civilizations and long sense chipped into anonymity, and he is what they will look like.

“This body,” Matt says between retching “is not used to being a body. It has to learn.”

“Look,” Claire says slowly thinking through her words carefully. Matt obviously knows more about what it is to be an angel than she does, but she knows bodies. “Look, even babies’ bodies know what to do. Bodies are bodies, you don’t have to train them.”

“Yeah but this one is brand spanking new.” He laughs, “It’s had to go right to being an adult and having an angel in it without any period of eating apple sauce and disgusting carrot puree.”

“What do angels know about baby food?” She says.

When his next bout of vomiting is done and his fever hot skin has cooled a little against her hand, he looks at her. “I was a guardian angel, I was around for the baby food days.”

“And your body,” she whispers to him, “it doesn’t look new. It looks almost thirty.”

“Our bodies,” He whispers back, matching her volume, pulling her closer into the ring of his dying wings, “Our bodies are our consolation prizes. We give up heaven and humanity is what we are given.”

Matthew doesn’t know, Claire thinks, how truly inhuman he looks sitting there in her restroom with glory scorched eyes and a mouth full of rotting fangs.

**Sunday**

“Bless me father for I have sinned.’’ Says the man in the confessional. Father Lantom cannot see his face. Normally the light of the church at least provides some sort of silhouette, but today the space beyond the screen is nothing but void. No more words or images are forthcoming from that blackness.

“How long has it been sense your last confession, son?” He asks, patiently.

“I’ve never confessed,” comes the answer and along with sound off the shuffling of wings.

The priest waits in the darkness for more. Eventually he says, “There’s always a first time, there is no need to feel guilty. You are here and that is what matters.”

He is good at comfort and he is good at honesty. He knows what to say and when to say it to make things just a little more right. He always has. That is why he became a priest, beyond the fact the loves God enough to dedicate his life to him. He wishes to use his gifts so that he may be the pair of soft hands he sees in his dreams sometime for others, so that he may ply his gifts as salves and ointments for the hurting. Strangely, today, he feels that this might not be enough.

“I’ve never had to before. Go to confession that is,” says the voice again, “I’ve always gone along with God’s plan. Done my best to do what I right to serve my holy purpose, but, father, I have fallen from his graces.”

The sound of feathers brushing against carved wood comes again. Lantom thinks the man might be crying. Then there’s a little retch as if someone is trying desperately not to vomit.

He will not, _will not,_ break the sanctity of his office. He will not take this man’s anonymity away in the middle of confession, he thinks with his fists balled up against his legs, but no vows nor faith require that he not step from behind his screen just a few moments earlier than etiquette generally requires. Just soon enough, he promises himself, to catch the young man as he leaves the church and help him to medical care or whatever sort of healing he might need.

“What have you done?” He says, softly, oh so softly, and with all the gentleness he can muster.

“There is no forgiving what I have done, nor can any penance wash it away. I came to ask forgiveness for what I am about to do.”

“That’s not how it works. What, exactly, are you going to do?” Father Lantom swallows and listens to the silence. Something large is shifting just beyond the partition. Wings and claws are moving there. And that glint is definitely the golden eye of a predator. He knows it is ridiculous, but he cannot stop his blood running cold.

He breathes shallowly and tries not to be afraid until the confessing speaker raises his voice to answer. “I am going to go to war.”

The door creaks open and the man is gone. The priest follows a moment later but there is no one there, just the wide emptiness of the church hours after mass is finished. He turns to the confessional and there on the seat are a number of feathers and a little pile of dust. He gathers the feathers in his hands. They are soft and fine like the feathers women used to wear on hats during the height of the French monarchy. They are soft and fine and just slightly scorched. He places them on the altar because that is the only thing that feels right and goes on about his day.

**Sunday, Also**

“What kind of glasses do you want?” says Claire into her phone while staring at the rows of sunglasses.

Matt, on the other end of the line, doesn’t answer for a minute. “I don’t think large frames will look good with my face shape.”

She nods to herself before thinking the words through. “You don’t even know what you face looks like, god you are no help.” She hangs up, then mutters to herself, “I just said the lord’s name in vain while on the phone with an angel. What the fuck am I doing with my life?”

“Excuse me miss, can I help you?” says a clerk who is obviously scared of her.

She sighs, “Yes. My roommate is blind,” at this the clerk looks vaguely alarmed, “and he broke his glasses. He doesn’t like to go out in public without them. Says people get weird about his…” she waves her hand vaguely in front of her eyes, “…eyes. So he needs the glasses pretty quickly. Could you tell me what sunglasses you have that I could buy right now?”

“Well,” says the clerk to the nurse, going in an instant from nervousness to business, “anything on the last shelf there can be ordered with any of our tinted lenses ready for pickup in 4 hours. But if he really needs them now I can show you some of our old display frames that we are trying to get rid of. We don’t have them on display ‘cause we want people to buy the expensive ones.” She pauses, then with a small frown says, “Don’t tell anyone I said that will you?”

Claire follows her a step behind when she ducks behind the counter and into the storeroom. It smells like dust and metal. “This,” says the clerk kicking a box of frames gently, “is all of our sunglasses.”

The box is nearly overflowing, and sitting rather forlornly on top is a pair of red tinted lenses. Claire reaches for them and holds them up to the flickering incandescent light. Their color is deep and almost devilish, like the color a kid might draw blood if they had never seen it before. Real blood is dark, but kids and cartoons always draw it in bright and almost luminous. Claire always wondered why that was.

This is the color of fallen angels, Claire thinks.

“We got a lot of complaints that those glasses made people look…” the sales girl trails off. It takes Claire a moment to realize that.

“Sorry,” she says, shaking herself back to awareness, “what were you saying?”

“I was about to say, well, that people complained that those glasses made them look too much like they were blind. But I’m guessing that’s not going to be much of a problem for him. If you want them you can have them, nobody’s going to be buying them anytime soon and we have like fifty pairs. Hell, take two so that if he breaks another pair you don’t have to do his shopping for him again.”

The clerk knew she was rambling, but the way the woman is contemplating the lenses is weirding her out a little. Even more so that the woman’s scowl earlier had scared her.

“I’ll take them, Thank you.” She says before exiting the room in a swirl of pale purple scrubs.

**Monday, 6:11 AM**

There is an angel in her apartment.

This is what she will not tell the police later. She will not tell them that because they already think she’s crazy and a liar and a murder on top of all that. But there certainly is an angel.

Her hands are dripping in blood and the knife burns into her palm and there is an angel before her. He kneels on the opposite side of the body like a penitent man in the midst of prayer. She thought at first that she was witnessing the collection of a soul, not that Karen Page believes in heaven. Except, the angel is not looking up, not looking at God, nor is he looking at the dead man. He is looking at her.

His wings are missing a few to many feathers but touched by the sunrise streaming through the window they are glorious. He is wearing a mask that conceals the upper half of his face, but he smiles at her and that is glorious to.

He presses a scrap of paper into her hand. His fingers are hot and burn worse that the knife. “Call this number,” he implores her, “when you get your one phone call, call this number. Call this number, he is a good lawyer and a better man, but do not take a deal.”

The angel is begging her. An angel is begging _her._ It is perhaps the most human advice she could have imagined coming from the lips of a man with wings who glowed so beautifully in the light, but the angel begged her so she will do it.

**Monday, Not much later**

Foggy is just locking his door when he hears the crash. It comes from behind his neighbor’s door and is accompanies by a muffled groan. “Claire,” he yells, banging on her door. “Claire are you alright in there?”

Foggy likes Claire. She is abrasive, private, and a very good neighbor considering the paper thin walls and the high number of not so great neighbors and roommates Foggy has had to deal with in the past. Claire doesn’t particularly like Foggy. No, that’s not quite right. She treats him with the same grudging practicality that she treats everyone who is not her patient. Foggy doesn’t mind, he takes what he can get.

“Claire,” he shouts again. There is movement inside. He waits a moment. “Just let me know you’re okay, ’cause I heard that crash and it wasn’t a good crash.”

The door opens. It isn’t Claire. It’s a man in wrapped in an oversized sweatshirt who looks decidedly worse for wear. He’s very pretty in a pale and stubbly sort of way.

“Oh,” says Foggy.

“Uh, Claire’s not home. Who are you?” says the stranger looking at Foggy. Well, Foggy thinks he is looking at him. His eyes are hidden behind a pair of shades redder than sin, or dark as sin, depending on what color one thought sin was. Foggy likes to think sin was the color of a fine red wine of the type that was so expensive that Foggy was never even going to set eyes on it let alone drink it. If that is indeed the case then the man’s glasses were _exactly_ the color of sin.

“I’m the neighbor, I heard a crash and I thought you might need help. I, uh, thought you were Claire. But it looks like you’re okay so I’ll just be going…”

“Actually, I could use your help.” Says the man, and turns on his heel back into the dark of the apartment.

Lying on the floor of the living room is a mess of books. Theirs titles are shadowed by the overwhelming gloom, but they looked mostly like medical textbooks. “I got really dizzy for a second and knocked over the shelf,” says the man, looking rather sheepish about it, “I managed to get the shelf back up. But I could use help getting the books back up in some sort of order. If Claire finds out that I’m having dizzy spells she’s going to put me on bedrest.”

“Tough, man, I’m happy to help,” says Foggy leaning down to pick up a book. He was right. Its title is Anatomy for the Nurse Practitioner. “But I don’t really know why you can’t do it yourself.” He says it amicably enough and it does produce a soft chuckle from the man.

“Well, beside the fact that I am blind and cannot be sure if I’m putting them in the right way up, I just don’t think bending down is a great idea right now.” He’s probably right about that. What Foggy had mistaken a few moments before for simple pallor looked more feverish now, and his mouth was locked in a polite scowl like he was trying not to let on that he sort of had to vomit.

“Shit man, I should have figured that out, I mean I’m a lawyer for god’s sake and your wearing blind person glasses, no offense.” Foggy said, trying desperately not to put his foot in his mouth.

“It’s okay,” laughs the man, a real laugh that flows from him like honey, “Claire got me these glasses because the store couldn’t sell them because customers thought they made them look like they were blind.”

Foggy stands there for a moment, then holds out his hand. “I’m Foggy Nelson, I’m holding out my hand for you to shake by the way.”

“I’m Mathew,” says Matt, who holds out his hand so that Foggy can take it and shake it.

“Well, let’s get these books up and then Claire can’t get mad at you.” Foggy says as he turn away from the man’s too pale face and his pained if pleasant expression.

“You’re too good.” Says Matt, not watching Foggy pick the books up for obvious reasons, but staring sightlessly in that direction anyway. There was a feeling in his gut that could be called melancholy. It is the pain at meeting an old friend and not being recognized. It is also the strange bittersweet taste of having made a descions that brings one closer to a friend yet creates a gulf when once there was none. It is a taste that Matt having had no human tongue before this has not tasted

This is when Foggy’s phone rings. “Hello,” he says, and Matt can here the stuttered words of Karen Page buzzing over the line. “Yes, I am a lawyer, I can be there right away.” And that particular sadness is washed monetarily away in a wave of knowing that he is doing the work he had fallen to do.

**The Moments between Monday and Tuesday**

Karen thinks of the angel as she is dying. She thinks of his threadbare wings and the way the fever beneath his skin felt when he touched her hands and the way her looked at her. She wishes that he would come and save her. That his glory would burn the hands of the man who was choking her, but she was dying and there was no angel.

Karen was never religious. Her parents went to church on Sundays sometimes and they prayed sometimes when there was something they needed or on special occasions like Christmas and Easter. Sometimes she went with them and sometimes she stayed at home with her aunt who ‘had an arrangement’ as she liked to put it with God, which basically meant that she didn’t mess around with God and she trusted God not to mess around with her. Karen never had to read Bible verses or go to Sunday school or do much more that be silent and not fidget when she sat with her parents during a sermon. She had come out of her childhood with an idea of religion that was mostly big strokes with not details at all.

She does, however, remember a story a priest had told her once. A man stands on his roof during a flood and a boat comes by. The captain offers to take the man to the safety of the coast guard outpost, but he refuses saying that God will provide for him. Sometime later, when the water has risen a little more, a helicopter outfitted with a rope ladder flies by and the pilot too offers him a ride to safety. Again, the man refuses on the basis that God will provide for him. Lastly, when the water is nearly at his knee and the man is running a rather high risk of being swept away by the current, a small raft floats by him. It is unpiloted but looks rather sturdy. All the man has to do to save himself is reach out, and the raft is not far away, and grab it. The man does, because God will provide for him. The man dies in the flood and if offered an audience with God in which he asks God to tell him why god did not provide. And God answers that he did provide. “I gave you a boat,” God says to the man, “and you turned it down. I gave you a helicopter and you turned your back on it. And I gave you a raft so that you could save yourself, yet you did not. I may provide for men, but men have to take what I provide and save themselves.”

This is what Karen thinks about as she shoves her fingernail into the eye of her assailant.

**Tuesday**

“Who is it?” yells Claire from her bedroom when Matt opens the door.

“How the hell am I supposed to know?” yells Matt right back at her. Banter, perhaps, is the human thing that he has taken to fastest.

“It’s Foggy,” says Foggy, “we met yesterday. You’re looking better.”

“Did you stop by just to check in on me?” says Matt, holding a hand over his heart as if he was deeply touched.

“No,” says Foggy.

“Seriously, who is it?” yells Claire from somewhere that is closer than her bedroom.

“It’s your weird neighbor.”

“Hey, I’m not weird!”

Karen, who had been silent, still nervous from the events of the last two days, and trying desperately not to shake, laughs.

“Who else is there?” says Matt.

“Matt, can I call you Matt, this is Karen. Karen this Matt. Matt is blind, but he’s cool. Matt, we are here to talk to Claire.” Foggy says really quite quickly, trying to get it all out before the situation could get even more out of hand.

Claire is very suddenly right there, leveling a serious and intimidating gaze at Foggy from behind Matt’s arm. “What do you need to talk to me about?”

“Um, well, see,” Foggy says very articulately, “Karen here can’t go back to her place for a number of reasons, and her clothes are a little bit very soaked, and you’re probably about her size. We were just wondering if you had like a pair of sweatpants and a shirt that she could borrow for the night. I’ll make sure too get them washed and back to you.”

Claire glares at him for a moment longer, then she smiles at Karen. “Come with me, we’ll find you something. The boys can handle themselves out here for a little bit.”

“So…” Foggy says when they are gone, “about the eye thing.”

“You want to know how it happened.” sighs Matt. That’s the thing about humans, they are always looking for a why. They go straight to the root. The visible root at least.

“Yeah, how did you get your peepers knocked out?”

“Well for one,” Matt says and turns towards the kitchen, “they weren’t knocked out.”

Foggy follows him, “That’s good because they would be really creepy.”

“They were burned away.” Foggy’s stomach drops away. All he can see behind his eyelids when he blinks are ashy charred eye sockets, terrible empty pits still smoking. It is not a good image, but one that cannot be chased away, because he does not know what is behind those red tinted lenses.

Then Matt continues seemingly unaware of the distress his words have caused. “You know how your mother always used to yell at you through the kitchen window whenever you were outside not to look at the sun because you’d go blind.” Foggy knew that exactly. His mom had done exactly that. He could remember her voice even now, and he could remember exactly how those summer days in the city tasted on his tongue. “Well, the sun can only make you go blind if you stare at it for a really long time, but imagine a light that is brighter and closer, something that you cannot help but look at it.”

“Oh,” says Foggy. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” smiles Matt, “there’s nothing anyone but me could have done.”

**In the Bedroom**

“Here,” says Claire. She hands Karen a shirt and a pair of well-worn sweat pants. Little yellow letters that march neatly down one leg spell out Brooklyn Bolts. Karen makes a face.

“What’s wrong?” asks Claire quietly.

“I’m a Hellions fan.”

Claire bursts out laughing. He laugh is more beautiful than she is. She is good looking. Men often call her hot, but she has too many rough edges to be really beautiful. There are always little frown lines along her mouth. Her eyebrows are always haphazardly plucked and makeup always takes a back seat to practicality. But her laugh has none of her harshness.

“Don’t tell that to my ex-boyfriend.”

There’s a pause while Karen pulls of her top and fumbles with her soaking bra. Claire very carefully doesn’t look.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” says Karen, when she has on a dry shirt. When Claire nods she continues, “What’s it like having a blind boyfriend?”

That was not at all what Claire had thought the question was going to be.

“Matt’s not my boyfriend.”

Karen’s brow furrows. “Then he’s your roommate…”

Claire laughs again, “I’m just taking care of him for a while.”

“That makes him sound like he’s a dog.”

“Yeah, but it’s true.” Claire says once she is done snorting. When she speaks again her voice is serious, it always is when she talks about health, “He’s sick, Karen. Barely keeps any food down and has a constant fever. I’m looking after him, making sure he’s drinking water and not over exerting himself. Somebody has to.”

**Later**

He sits across from her. A bottle of alcohol so cheap that it is beyond classification and two half full glasses sit between them. His wings are perhaps half the size they were when she first saw them. The ends are slowly crumbling into little piles of ash on her floor. She already vacuumed once since he arrived, and she’ll have to do it again soon. Sometimes she can even the exposed bones and remaining feathers smoking from the corner of her eye. She prays to the dear lord that he doesn’t set off the fire alarm.

 Despite the increasing number of feathers that drift off him, he is looking better. Some of that she knows can be attributed to the fact that his eyes are now firmly hidden behind glasses. But he did eat half a thing of ramen and managed to keep it down, so she’ll call that progress.

“What are you going to do when your wings are gone?” She says, the alcohol making her tongue loose.

“What do you mean?” Matt furrows his eyebrows. It’s a rather cute expression, Claire thinks blearily.

“I mean aren’t you going to miss them?” She leans even farther over the table than she already had been.

“These wings are nothing like my real ones. The ones I lost. These are just this body trying to adapt to having an angel inside it. Just like the teeth and the scales. Anyway it’s not like I was ever going to fly with these.” Matt pauses. He considers. “And I’ll still be able to do this even when they are gone.”

He closes his eyes. He whispers a prayer to himself. Claire can’t quite make out the words but it is definitely a prayer. Then, suddenly, her tiny living room is full of light and feathers and whispers. The world shakes and warps like the glory and terror of the thing sitting across from her is physically bending it in on itself. There are too many wings for the too small space and too many eyes. She can’t see them butt she can feel them looking at her.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says.

Then, a few beats later, “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” says Matt who is thankfully a man again rather than a shining ravenous beast, “I don’t really mind, and anyway you’re drunk.”

“And you’re not.” She points an accusatory finger at him.

“Sorry.” He looks ashamed, “It was a valiant effort, but I’m afraid my system burns just burns it off.”

“That,” Claire spits, “is some Elf level bullshit right there.”

He motions her over, and she goes to him even though she shakes. As much as she had grown used to seeing him in her apartment, to his wings brushing hers in the tiny kitchens she is still terrified. He is an angel and she is a nurse who was not yet reconciled to believing in heaven. As pathetically human as he seemed, he was still so much vaster and older than she would ever be.

This she had not forgotten. The display of golden power had been only a reminder of something she already knew deep within her.

“Do you feel that?” He asks her, holding her hand against his stomach.

“Yeah, you have a fever dumbass.” She snaps.

He pulls her closer still, till her is whispering into her ear and his too hot breath is brushing against her neck. “There’s a devil of a fire within me, Claire, one that not even falling can put out.”

**Wednesday, Earliest Morning**

God, thinks Karen, here I am dying for the second time in as many days. She is terrified and aching. Tears streak her face. There is a man just a few feet away from her who has a knife in his hand and it didn’t burn him as the bloody knife she had clutched had burned her. Yet, all she can thinks about is how twice is an awful high number of almost deaths for such a short period of time. Or, she thinks as the man stands up, of real deaths.

Balls, eyes, jugular, instep, nose, knees. Those are the places to go. She recites them to herself as she walks home from the office or the bar every night. She recites them to herself now. Balls, eyes, jugular, instep, nose, knees.

She steels herself to fight even as she cries. She steels herself even though she is slumped against a wall with her head pounding and her eyes unfocused.

Then, oh thanks to be to god in heaven, then the angel is there, her angel. He is there with his hands on he would be murder.

It might have looked like the angel in the mask was dancing with the man with the knife if dancing has been invented by the Spartan themselves. The angel’s dodges are grace and his punches hell. She can hear them connecting with face and ribs and other bones. If she had remembered what little she had read of the Bible it would be now that she would finally understand what was meant when it said that angels were both beauty and terror.

Then the angel and the man went out the window. His wings, bedraggled, broken and singed as they were, beat the air mightily as they fell. They land together, the attacker pinned beneath the angel’s boot. Karen can see how furious the angel is. It is visible, it radiates off of him as if he is burning. It makes him steam in the rain.

He removes the flashdrive form the other man’s pocket, then looks up at her where she is standing on the fire escape. “I will get this to the proper people, Miss Page.” He says, and his voice is beautiful.

“You can’t,” she yells over the downpour, “You can’t tell the police.”

“I have no plans to, Miss Page. I am going to tell everybody.”

**Wednesday, Early Morning**

A man is found on the front steps of The Daily Bulletin. To his neck is tied a flashdrive and a single feather from some great predatory bird.

“Please,” he says to Ben Urich when he arrives on the scene, “please don’t let the angel find me. He’ll take me to hell this time, he really will.”


	2. Episode 2: Scorch Man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thus says the Lord: “Execute judgment and righteousness, and deliver the plundered out of the hand of the oppressor. Do no wrong and do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, or the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place. - Jeremiah 22:3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you liked this please [reblog this post](http://roswell-talk.tumblr.com/post/118121960190/forgive-us-our-trespasses-ch-1). It helps people find this fic. 
> 
> I "forgot" that X-men aren't part of the MCU because I think I am funny sometimes.
> 
> This chapter is shorter but my god the next one is long.

**Thursday, Almost Shift Change**

 “The doctor said they had never seen anything like it,” says the woman as Claire pulls back her bandages. There is a touch of pride in her voice.

“Well, neither have I.” Says Claire, very carefully not lying. She, as a rule, does not lie to patients. She tells them when they are dying and when their doctors are incompetent and when they are fucking themselves over. Some hate her for it and some love her, but she is always honest.

Claire doesn’t lie to this one, because it’s true that she’s never seen a burn like this, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have some idea how it got there.

The burn, if you can call it that, is the shape of two fingers with the edge of a palm just visible in the shape off the scorched blisters. Blisters that are red gold and shining. They look like the sunset, or like drops of ancient amber. She knew the color. She had seen it several times in the last strange and dreamlike week.  

“Can you tell me how your arm was broken?” Claire asks.

“I told the police already.” There was steel in her voice. She was scared, oh that much was clear, but nobody much liked the police around here. You keep your stories straight, too. That sort of thing was taught along with basic sex ed, and even earlier than that sometimes. Don’t talk to strangers, mothers say as they help pack their children’s backpacks and slip in hand written notes with hearts drawn in red Crayola marker. And if you do, they scold, keep your stories straight.

They teach you to say things once and not again.

“I know, but I’m not the police.” Claire says, imploring.

“I was assaulted in a parking lot. A man grabbed me from behind and slammed me against the concrete wall, but something spooked him and he ran off. I hat hit my head against the wall and it took me a few minutes to come back to myself and call the police. Something burned me while I was blacked out.” She speaks her words like an accountant, budgeting them out in discrete packages, that are designed not the draw attention.

Claire rolls her eyes despite the sympathy she feels for her patient. “Do you know what spooked him?” she asks.

“I told you I don’t know.”

“Well, what if I just talked for a while, and you can tell me if it seems familiar to you.”

The woman nods, uncertain at this new turn off events.

 Claire begins. “You’re alone in a car park. You’re fumbling for yours keys because it’s dark and you thought you saw a shadow. You have pepper spray in your bag, or maybe it’s one of those keychains with spikes, it doesn’t really matter because you can’t get it out of your purse without stopping and all you want to do is be in your car, locked away from whatever’s out there. And suddenly there’s a man behind you. He has you by the throat and you can‘t get your arms up to jab him in the eye like your mother taught you. He’s thrown you against the wall. You can’t move fast enough and he’s there and you’re probably going to die and maybe you’re pulling in your leg for one last kick but it doesn’t matter because he’s there. But then…”

Claire breaths, and attempts to ease the tightness in her chest before she continues.

“But then there is an angel. He looks like he could be anyone, could be human, except for the wings and the fact that he is glowing. He burns in the dark of the car park. It doesn’t matter exactly how he drives off your attacker. Maybe he reaches out his hands and burns him or maybe just the sight of someone so inhuman drives him off. Then he turns to you and his eyes they are like the sun and if your mom saw them she’d probably tell you not to look at them for too long let they blind you.”

The unfortunate, or perhaps fortunate, woman is staring at her with some sort of reverence.  “You know what his eyes look like?”

“You didn’t see them?” She can’t imagine Matt, and it was Matt because there are probably no other fallen angels in Hell’s Kitchen, going out fighting criminals in his too dark glasses.

“If they’re like you said I think I’d know if I did,” She laughs, not freely but at least sweetly, “Miss, you could be a poet.”

“Well,” says Claire, “he does like to make an impression.”

**Thursday, A Kitchen**

When Claire returns her apartment she is met by smells of roasting garlic and melting butter. Where those smells are coming from is momentarily a mystery since she can’t imagine that Matt could have found either of those things in her bone bare cupboards.

In the end it turns out to be Karen’s doing. She made Foggy take her to the supermarket so that she could cook him a proper dinner. Then she had promptly discovered that Foggy, despite being a pretty okay cook and a lawyer to boot, was living like a college student on as few utensils as necessary. He didn’t even have a proper casserole dish. So, of course, that had necessitated knocking on Claire’s door to borrow one. Claire, at least had that. In fact she had a wide array of crockery and a slightly smaller but still adequate array of pots and pans. What she didn’t have was any talent for using them. And borrowing a casserole dish had led to inviting Matt, and by extension Claire, for dinner. But Matt, being infinitely more comfortable in a space he knew versus one he didn’t, had offered Claire’s and the whole happy group had colonized the place.

This is the train of events she will learn later when they are all wrapped in the light of her living room light and too full of Karen’s grandmother’s casserole to move.

For now she is greeted by Karen waving her over to where she stands over a frying pan making some sort of sauce, “Thank god you’re here Claire, maybe you can stop Foggy eating the noodles before I even put them in the casserole. Matt is being no help.”

“Hey!” shouts Foggy rather indignantly for someone who is currently stealing a piece of Penne from the strainer. 

“What am I supposed to do, I’m blind! I can’t see when he’ thieving,” calls Matt a beat later.

“I am not a thief!” says Foggy even more indignantly.                              

Claire is beaten down. She’s tired and the smell of the emergency room still clings to her skin. Worse than that her anger and fear still roil inside her barely contained by her skin just like the water of the ocean roils during a storm barely contained by the shore. But she is hungry so she puts it all aside to peer at the developing casserole. It looks lovely.

“I know it’s not much, but it’s my grandmother’s recipe,” Karen says with a small touch of pride, “she made me swear that I would only feed it too my future husband.”

Foggy who has been glaring at Matt and Matt who has been attempting to glare at Foggy but who has instead ended up staring the general direction of the fridge both turn around to look at Karen. Claire looks at Karen too.

“Why?” They all say, more or less at once.

“I don’t know maybe it’s like full of virtue, or,” she sighs, “maybe it’s because I spent a lot of my early teen years threatening to run away with a boy, it didn’t really matter which one, I wasn’t picky, and live in sin. I think she didn’t like the thought of me cooking her recipes for some random man who I was dooming myself to hell for.”

They all continue to stare at her.

“What?” Karen says.

“You must have been a riot as a teenager,” says Foggy with a low whistle.

“And you weren’t?” She huffs.

“I was, in fact, the model of a perfect son.” He says, hand over heart.

Claire snorts. “I highly doubt that. But,” she says turning to Karen, “he’s right. I was a monster as a teenager and even I wasn’t like that.”

“I wasn’t _like_ anything, I just didn’t get along with my grandma or mom.”

“I understand,” says Claire, who does.

“So,” say Foggy, “How about you, Matt?”

“How about me, what?” He says, smirking.

“Well, Claire was a monster, I was a paragon of virtue, and Karen was, well, whatever that was,” Foggy makes a vague hand gesture in Karen’s direction, “What were you like as a teenager?”

“Oh, I was a good catholic boy.”

“Really?” Foggy nearly spits. Matt only smiles and reaches beneath his too big sweatshirt to pull out a gold crucifix on a chain. It’s small, perhaps the size of a finger bones, and tarnished. It looks old beyond years against his sickly pale skin, but still it gleams.

Foggy recovers from the sort of trance they had all momentarily fallen into first. “Doesn’t that mean you were like incredibly kinky?”

“Franklin Nelson, I will not have that sort of talk in my kitchen,” says Karen. She’s terrible at not laughing. Her thin lips are all screwed up in a smirking attempt at holding back giggles at Matt’s offended expression.

“Technically, it’s my kitchen,” snaps Claire, “But I agree with the lady, no talking about kinks in my kitchen.”

**Friday**

Only Matt’s footprints from his hasty visit three days before marred the perfect blanker if dust in the place. Nothing else had been disturbed in the fourteen years sense the doors had closed. The whole place smelled like death and age. The punching bags swung obliquely in the first air current they had felt in more than a decade and the back corners had not been touched by light for far longer than that.  It could have been a tomb and was in fact a tomb for a lot of things like hopes and dreams and good morals.

The angel Mahiel looks upon this, or does not look but sees anyway, and smiles.

He starts at the lockers on the right side. Starts at the one on the very end that still had the announcement for a fight featuring the Rattling Jack Murdock on it. It was that locker he had opened after his first mass as a human the Sunday before and riffled through desperate to find the tiny cross he knew hung there on a rusty nail placed only for the purpose of holding it.

Jack Murdock had worn that cross for twenty years. He has worn it to his mother’s funeral, then some years later his father’s. He had worn it every night as he slept and every day as he had trained. But he took it off before every fight because even when your talent was in taking a punch you don’t want to be choked in a fight.

On most fight nights it hung in whatever r the actual boxing ring provided, but he had hung it with reverence that last night before his last fight, when his bones we aching and his hands were shaking. He had hoped that somebody would find it. And he had imagined as he walked into the ring gloves up and ready to go that that someone would give it to somebody who would wear it and believe in it. Maybe not believe in the church or in anything or everything that the little golden crucifix represented, but in _it_ as an object _._

Perhaps, though he hadn’t quite imagined that it would take quite so long nor that the wearer would be so strange.

Matt starts with the locker. He shakes out the robe with its red glitter letters stitched on the back and pulls out the paper towels and cleaners. He starts to clean with single minded fervor.

He likes having a purpose. That’s what angels were built for after all.

Humans, well, humans are built like mazes all curving puzzling beauty. They are built like stories, one idea after another piled on haphazardly as they are thought of, growing and flourishing in ways no one could have predicted. They aren’t built for anything but themselves.

Angels, however, are built to a purpose. They may be huge monstrous unknowable things but they are huge monstrous unknowable things that are made to protect and to guide. They are, in short, built for other people. From the moment an angel is born, coalesces from faith and glory and other things too, till the end of everything that angel has a purpose.

 Unless of course that angel falls and their office is stripped from them. Then they had to find their purpose on their own. Which, as any human would tell them while rolling their eyes, was hard.

Today Matt had found a purpose and that was ridding the disused gym of dust. Scrubbing with soap and water and rags at the general grime until the sealed wooden floor looked fresh again. He worked till his hands were raw and his knuckles hurt.

He looked at what was done and thought about how much there was left to do and he smiled.

**Friday 9 PM**

“What are you still doing here?” Foggy asks Karen. He’s starring at her from around his frosted glass door. It isn’t the expensive sort of frosted glass that might adorn doors in, as Foggy often puts it, real law firms. It makes the place dated, and not as both Foggy and Karen, claim somewhat hopefully and somewhat resignedly, charmingly retro.

“I was just enjoying your music choices.” Says Claire, almost succeeding but in the end failing to not snicker.

“What?” He laughs, “It’s perfectly fine music!”

“It’s just, Foggy, Ave Maria really?” She’s laughing at the look on his face, “I mean, isn’t it a little pretentious for somebody who told me yesterday that you were happily the least religious man on the planet?”

“I’m not religious,” he answers, “But I used to dream of it, you know? The music, I mean. I don’t know where I heard it ‘cause I never went to church as a kid or really listened to any of that kind of thing, but some nights it was like that’s all I could hear. My dreams were full off it, not to mention stained glass windows and angels, the whole glorious shebang really.”

Karen blinks at him through the gloom for a minute desperately trying the reconcile the laughing irreverent Foggy, whose every other sentence includes taking the lords name in vain, with a Foggy who dreamed of religious glory.

“Now I’ve told you something personal about me,” he continues, “you have to tell me why you’re still here. It would be really impressive for you to have only been working here for six hours and to already have a backlog. You don’t already have a backlog, do you? And anyway, it’s not like this box of…” he peaks inside the box she had been going through a few moments before, “…blank paper won’t be here in the morning.”

She looks away from him and swallows. “I just didn’t want to go home.”

“Well, then don’t go home. Go out, get drunk, have fun. The world is wide and you’re a pretty lady, go out have fun. Hell, if you don’t mind me I’ll go out with you, we can hop a few bars and not think about anything.”

**Thursday 10 PM**

“Where is the boy?” Matt asks the Russian man he has pinned to the wall. He hisses the question at him with his all too human lungs heaving from the scuffle.

“It’s more than my life is worth to tell you,” the man spits.

“Well maybe not your life,” says Matt and the man screams.

He screams because this is when Matt reaches into his chest. Not into his chest as a surgeon would, cutting away meat and sinews and ribs, but into his chest like a ghost. His finger sliding through the man skin like sunbeams through, glass luminescence and all. Their furious glow still shines through his flesh. The angel grips something there and the man screams.

“I want you to know why I fell,” says Matt to the man, “I didn’t fall because I loved some human. I didn’t fall because I rebelled or because I loved Lucifer. I fell because I love this. I fell because I love the feeling of holding your pitiful souls in my hands. I could rip you from your own chest now and feel no qualms. Do you understand?”

The man nods.

“Now tell me where the boy is.”

The man gives him an address and Matt let’s go.

**A Long Time Before**

Even when he sleeps Jack Murdock’s bones ache. He wraps his knuckles every time but still they break. He’s not old, not yet, but he settles into bed slowly bowed by weariness. He wakes in the morning stiff at the joints. And in between he feels his body settle like an old house even as he dreams.

Mahiel stands above his bed and watches the little flam of faith burn within his charge’s chest. He cannot do much. He is a protector, a friend in the dark, a messenger of faith, but he cannot change the world except in little ways. He reaches out one of his thousand hands. He burns away the possible infection in a cut the boxer had been to weary to clean himself.

This he can do.

He keeps Murdock’s coffee warm just a few minutes longer than it would without him. He steps before him when the winds whistle through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen like they are canyons. They still blow against Murdock’s face and pass through his too thin clothes like they are nothing, but filtered through the empty air where Mahiel stands they blow and bluster just a mite warmer.

He leans down his monstrous head and places a kiss to the boxer’s head with his dry lipless mouth and then Jack Murdock dreams of being wrapped in golden arms. He dreams of having his aches eased by the touch of great golden hands. And he dreams of a voice like the cry of a thousand starlings all singing at once that speaks to him.

This he can do as well.

**Thursday 11 PM**

Karen is radiant in the red low light of the bar. It burns against her pale skin. It’s not like Matt’s, which is all unnatural and sickly, it just looks clean. Foggy wonders how she does it. She only ever looks splotchy when she is crying and he looks splotchy all the time. It’s rather unfair.

They’re both a little tipsy and leaning into each other and laughing about something or other that neither of them can really remember. It’s been a long time sense either of them have had a friend to go drinking with and they were almost giddy on the companionship.

 Well, that isn’t quite true because Foggy goes drinking with Marci all the time but there’s always an expectation inherit in the event. Usually for sex, but also for help on a brief or for some piece of information she needed. Marci doesn’t do anything without a clear and goal for what her actions could yield. Foggy doesn’t mind. In fact he admires her single minded self-interest. Maybe, he thinks sometimes, if he had it too he might not be living of dimes and running the least profitable law practice in all of New York City.

It was nice though to have a night out that wasn’t also a sort of unspoken negotiation. It was nice to lean into Karen and whisper a joke and get a real laugh. That was exactly what he was doing right this second.

“Honey,” says the bartender looking at them through narrowed but affectionate eyes, “you could do so much better.”

“Hey!” cries Foggy.

At the same time Karen says, “This isn’t a date.”

When the bartender shakes her grizzled head and moves down the bar to refill an alcoholic’s tumbler, he turns to Karen. “This isn’t a date, is it?” he says it in a joking tone, but also a hopefully, because he could do much worse than Karen.

“Foggy,” Karen says leaning in and then leaning in further, he voice is serious, and her eyebrows draw together. She looks Serious with a capital S. His heart races a little inside his chest. “Foggy I am very, very gay. I am,” she hiccups, “a huge homo.” He face is still serious but her eyes are glittering in the low light and it’s clear that she is just a second away from laughing again.

“Well,” says Foggy attempting to mimic her mock serious expression, “then it’s okay for me to tell you this. I am so, so, so, queer. Karen, I am just so bisexual it hurts some times.” He realizes what he said, and tries to say, “I didn’t mean it like that,” but it’s pretty useless sense they are both in stitches by the time the last word leaves his mouth.

**Friday, 12 AM**

Sometimes Matt really wishes that he had gotten one of the infamous glowing swords. It would make things so much easier. Instead he twirls among the Russians delivering punches the human way, burning them with the heat the courses through his veins.

It’s tiring. As an angel he had known the facts of sleep and had of course known its usefulness as a conveyer of dreams. He had not, however, understood the why of it. He does now. His muscles groan as he ducks beneath a swinging arm. He longs for a moment for Claire’s couch to rest his weary body, but he doesn’t let the desire win. He has men to fight after all.

He cannot really see them. He is after all blind, but he has retained that angelic sense of intention even through falling. He can see where their intentions will take his opponents moment to moment like golden shadows in the darkness. There will be a hand there in a moment, he thinks, and there will be a person there. It is not perfect. Sometimes no one is actually there, and sometimes there are people where there we not meant to be any. He takes a kick to the side and punch to the nose, but he, in turn, delivers a right hook learned from a thousand hours presiding over boxing matches and trips a man with his leg.

Then there are more and they have guns. He can see the intention to shoot within them all mixed up with the fires of faith the burn there. It’s not in the church of course but in their brotherhood. Matt can respect that. But he really, really doesn’t want to get shot today. Not with a helpless kid in the balance.

“Enough,” he says. He says something else too, something in the old language of angels. A sound that his human throat cannot reproduce perfectly. It shakes the corridor and stops ever man in his place.

He does the thing he did for Claire to get her to understand. Except this time he doesn’t worry about the physical space available he just does it. He is wings, 40 or 50 of them branching from the thing that might be his body, buffeting is opponents, filling the space with hawk feathers. He is light, golden and burning. It is not the kind of light that creeps cross window sills but the kind that flows in burnished tides to wrap you in its fierce hands. He is singing, raucous and beautiful, like a thousand bird and a thousand beasts all welcoming the coming of day at once.

He is all of this and more, and not it is even a fraction of what he once was. He is that for only a moment. It is enough to bring the men to their knees and to bring him to them too.

“Shit,” he says and throws up. If he had vision it would be blurring now. He is too hot. The air around him is to cold. His hands shake. The world has gone to bits. He falls to the hard concrete floor and lies there alone. I need to remind myself, he thinks, to win fights the old fashioned way.

**Friday 12:43 AM**

The door opens, it is not the hard man with the hard hands and the hard smile who speaks in a language that is not Spanish and is not English. It is an angel. John is only nine but he definitely knows what angels look like. The ones in books don’t glow like this one does but that is probably because they are in a book.

“Hello,” says the angel crouching down to look at him. He is wearing a mask. John doesn’t mind, it just makes him like Captain America or any other one of John’s countless heroes.

“Do you know Angel?” Asks John, not to be deterred by a small thing like being kidnapped when it came to superheroes.

“What?” says the angel.

“Angel. He has big wings like you, but his are white. He fights with the x-men. He’s super cool! Do you know him?” Says John excitedly.

“He’s not a rea…” starts the angel, before thinking better of it, “Not all angels know each other.” The angel’s mouth is tight confusion. He looks, at least the part of him not covered by a mask, just like John’s dad when he starts talking about superheroes or the books he reads in class. John knows that look, it means that the angel knows there is something that he is supposed to do but he hasn’t the faintest clue what.

“It’s okay,” says John, “do you know Captain America?”

“Uh, no.” says the angel, “I do know a few saints though.”

“Oh,” says John, rather disappointed. He had dreamed of meeting Captain America and the Avengers, and Angel and the X-men so many time. Sometimes they saved him, trooped all the way from the respective bases to save him and only him. Sometimes, he saved him. Sometime he got to be the hero’s hero. Angels, not capital A angels who had cool costumes and awesome friends, but normal everyday angels like the one squatting in front of him were cool, but they weren’t his heroes.  

“I guess it’s just not the same, is it?” says the angel.

John shrugs.

“Well,” says the angel, “how would you like to go home?”

**Friday 1:30 AM**

John’s father paces. He is waiting for the ransom call. He does not know the specifics of the kidnapper’s request, not yet, but he is a medical examiner, for god’s sake, it’s not hard to guess the generalities. He doesn’t know which of the bodies under his care it will be, and there are a lot of bodies, but he can already hear them asking for this death to be declared an accident or that one a suicide. Maybe they’ll ask him to make a body disappear either in reality or under a load of red tape and paperwork. But he does know that whatever it is he will do it.

There is a knock at the door.

It is a man in a mask. “I suppose you’re here to make your demands and maybe rough me up a bit?” asks John’s father.

“No,” says the man. His voice is rough and weary. His shoulder slump a little. John’s father has never met an enforcer but he has seen enough of their bodies to understand. They are always mean looking men whose shoulder are straight and proud even in death and whose mouths are so used to snarling that even rigor mortis can’t take the expression away from them.

“Follow me,” he says and turns away into the darkness. On his back nestle a pair of threadbare wings. Feathers stick up at odd angles and it’s obvious that at least some of the long outer bones of the wings are missing. They are definitely real. They flap idly as he moves as if stretching and there are no straps or harnesses visible even underneath the man’s tight black shirt. Also as the man moves out into the darkness it is clear that he is glowing.

John’s father follows.

There is a shopping cart parked in the street outside his tiny house. John, wrapped in a gray sweatshirt against the chill of early autumn, is asleep in it. “Sorry,” says the man, “I know you probably don’t like the thought of your kid being pushed around in a shopping cart but he was too tired to walk and it was either that or burn him.”

“Burn him?” says Johns father, his arms around his son.

“Yes,” says the rescuer. He hold up his hands. His glow, John’s father, realizes then is not bioluminescence but heat. It rolls off him in waves. He looks at the plastic on the handle of the stolen cart. It’s pot marked and boiling. Yes, he thinks, the shopping cart was better than touching my son.

“No more men will come after you or your son. I have given those who took them warning enough, I think.” He has stopped talking like a man and started talking like a preacher. “And beyond that my blessings are with you. Ever this night, may a protector be at your side, to light and guard, to rule and guard. Amen.” He crosses himself.

“Uh, thank you.” Says John’s father, unsure what to do with the sudden religious sentiment. “Thank you so much for brining my son home to me.”

“It’s the least I can do,” says the rescuer, and then, of all things, bows. It’s sort of awkward. John’s father has the impression looking at him that this is his first rescue, or at least the first rescue where he’s had to deal with a thankful parent.

“Um,” he says.

“Yes?” says John’s father.

They both wait in the non-light of early morning waiting for the other to speak. Finally the man says quietly, “Could I have my sweatshirt back? I mean I don’t mind giving it to the kid but it’s hard to find a sweatshirt that covers my wings so well.”

**Friday 3 AM**

When he climbs back through the window of her apartment Claire is waiting to pounce like an angry aunt on report card day. He arms are crossed. Matt doesn’t need to see that to know she’s pissed. He can see it boiling in her chest.

“Were you out there fighting crime or whatever it is you call saving women in car parks?” she asks with a stern if overall pointless glare.

Matt nods.

“Am I now going to have to give you some medicine and make sure you are okay?”

“I’m fine.” says Matt defensively.

“Is that’s you final answer? Cause if you say yes I’m not going to give you the array high quality painkillers and fever reducers I have already set out for you.”

“I’m fine,” he insists again, “I don’t need anything.”

“Bullshit,” she spits, “Now you are going to sit down at that table and you are going to take those pain killers.”

He does that, gulping them down with water and making a face at their chemical taste. He breaths out an a little cloud of steam rolls out of his mouth. It’s the most ridiculous thing Claire has seen in a long time. She snickers. He looks up hopeful that her laugh means he’s escaped her wrath.

“No,” she says interpreting his look correctly, “you are not getting out of this just because you look like one of those sad sick dragons in the trashy fantasy novels I used to read as a kid.”

“I feel like shit,” he says.

“You look like shit,” she replies, “It serves you right.”

He’s taken off his mask but not yet retrieved his tinted glasses and his eyes look mournful. He looks into the now gently bubbling glass of water. “A kid was kidnapped, tonight. They took him right off the street in broad daylight, Claire. They took him and they didn’t think twice about anyone coming for them. Claire I had too.”

“Did you save him?” she asks, laying her hand over his not even drawing back from the near burning fire she feels there.

“Yes,” he sighs.

“Do you know how many times I’ve treated people with bruises they shouldn’t have and had to stop myself from getting a scalpel and cutting the open the sun of a bitch who put them there?” Every time she speaks she presses a little harder against his hand willing him to understand.

“I can only imagine,” he says.

“I treated a woman yesterday,” Claire murmurs to him, “he arm was burned in the shape of your two fingers. She’ll have a scar there for the rest of her life, you know.” She holds up a hand to forestall his words, “I know you didn’t mean to hurt her, ‘cause she told me. And I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you were more careful with the kid you rescued today. Hell, I admire what you do. If I had freaky angel powers I would definitely be out doing what you are doing. But I am going to say these two things and you are going to listen to me.

“Firstly, you don’t know jack shit about what it’s like to be in a body. I don’t know angels but I know bodies and I know you pushed yourself too far tonight. I know that sometimes there are going to be things you have to do no matter what you feel,” she says again guessing what the angel was opening his mouth to say, “but you better fucking make sure you don’t fucking die in the middle of rescuing someone you promised to save, or I swear to your God that I will hunt you down and kill you again myself.

“And lastly, you don’t know shit about what it’s like to be human. Don’t fucking screw this up for the people you think you are protecting,” she finishes her rant with a forceful look, before changing her mind and adding one last thing, “also if you make me play nurse maid every day I am going to be so fucking pissed.”

**Dawn**

Foggy, having stayed awake though the night, seeks to rescue his pounding head from Karen's snores by climbing out on his fire escape. He think it might be nice to watch the sun rise, but instead he ends up staring at a hunched over Matt staring at the city through sightless eyes. It makes him want to cry.


	3. Episode 3 Part 1: The Dove

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also. - James 2:26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has taken me more than a year and a half to write. I lost the entirity of the next four chapters once, got a new computer, went to college, and lost two people I love between when the last chapter was published and this one. I hope you can forive me the pause, I promis my writing did get better in that time. 
> 
> This "episode" comes in two parts. This week is part one, The Dove, next week is part two, The Snowstorm.

**Just after Midnight, The following Sunday**

Foggy dreams. Except it is not a dream; it's a scrap of memory that he has dreamed so many times he has ceased to be able to tell whether it happened the way he dreams it or whether it is just a bastardization of a real memory by the mind of a scared child.

This is the dream.

He is walking home from school, having learned quickly enough that as a chubby, more or less friendless kid who's stop is the absolute last that the bus was not for him. In high school, undergrad, and law school Foggy was almost universally liked but middle school did not treat him so well. In those days Foggy’s ability to be confident and comfortable in his place on the social ladder no matter what it was, had not yet become a virtue. Instead, among the uncertain and pubescent, it made him near untouchable. 

Anyway, the walk is not long and he enjoys the time to ruminate, if one could call a thirteen-year-old thinking ruminating. In this particular memory his mind is full of Thurgood Marshall and Marx, an odd combination for a 7th grader but a necessary one. It is two nights before his first debate for the school debate club and he is practically swimming in precedent.

_In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay our selves the highest tribute._

The rhythm of the lines mark his steps and fill him up until there is nothing else. It takes him a long time to notice that the sky is dark and that he is lost.

This is not supposed to happen not to him. His neighborhood is supposed to be beaten into his bones. He should not be lost. It’s a strange moment between twilight and true night; much later that it should have been Foggy thinks when he looks back on it.

He teeters on the edge of panic. The streets are strangely empty for late summer in the city. There is no one to ask for help, even the disreputable dregs of the populace that normally fill the streets and whom he wouldn’t really consider asking for help seem to have dissipated in the strange light of this odd hour. He back tracks a block or too hoping for revelation. Yet, there is nothing familiar only the blank and unfriendly edifices of the dark buildings.

He turns a corner and there is a man standing underneath the streetlight, his back to Foggy. Foggy open his mouth to call for help. He steps forward. The man turns around. He moves through the light like a dancer in water, his hair floating around him in lazy waves. There are feathers in his hair and burning desserts in his eyes.

Foggy can not get his words out, not around his fear, but the thing in the streetlight knows. It leans down to him, it’s head traveling a thousand miles though space, in the span of a second.

“Do not worry, my friend, what once was lost shall now be found,” the thing says with a slow smile full of sharp teeth.

Foggy wakes at this part every time. He does not remember what comes next. It is lost to the stormy seas of his memory, those same seas that repeatedly toss up this jagged shard of recollection on the shores of his subconscious. He made it home, he knows that, so the thing the the street light must not have eaten him. But still it makes his stomach clench with fear and churn with nausea every time he thinks of it.

Especially tonight, when, for the first time the thing has Matt’s face.

 

**Sunday**

“Where’s Matt?” Foggy asks Claire when she opens the door.

“It’s Sunday,” she answers with a yawn, then waking up a bit and realizing that Foggy doesn’t understand she says “He’s at church.”

“Oh,” says Foggy, “I didn’t think Matt was the church going type.”

She gives him a strange look, all too knowing. “He told you he was catholic didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” he shrugs, “I just didn’t translate being a ‘good catholic boy’ with you know actually going to church. I thought his family was like religious or something. He seems too like normal or whatever to be really properly go to confession and read the bible catholic.”

“He’s not an asshole about it, if that’s what you mean,” Claire laughs, and Foggy laughs too at the image of Matt the bible thumper, his glasses coming more and more askew every pound of his fist connects with the book

“Sometimes I hear him praying, late at night, when he thinks I’m asleep. He doesn’t like to rub his religion in other people’s faces. And he’s certainly private with it, but…”

“But even when he’s being an asshole he’s holier than thou,” Foggy finishes.

“Something like that.” Claire says, rolling her eyes. They are bright and sharp as they observe Foggy. Even when she clutches her coffee to her chest, the corners of her eyes still full of the sands of sleep, her eyes pierce. “Say what you want to say. I don’t care.”

“I just don’t get it you know,” Foggy says, shrugging again, trying to make it seem like this wasn’t something that bothered him, “I mean I don’t want to get in the way of anyone’s beliefs but how can he do it. I mean he’s blind and you said he was sick, probably dying. He looks like the grave most days. And… and… I saw him on the fire escape one morning looking like he wanted to throw himself off. How can someone like him still believe in god?”

It was the longest time that Claire had ever listened to him speak. It tumbled out of him in a rush all gabbled. Mostly, Foggy prides himself on being more articulate than that, but today it’s all he can manage.

“Foggy, Matt doesn’t know how to not be religious. God could send him a note telling him to go fuck himself and he’d still show up for church on Sunday and hope to take communion.”

 

**In Church**

Father Lantom looks up in the middle of a line about the strangeness of god’s mercy. The words of his sermon half way transform into a cry of “fire!” before he stops himself, because the fire is a long way a way. Much father than the last pew. Father away than the chapter house or the corner store or the place where Lantom was born on the other side of the city, father than the horizon but still burning bright. A blink later, and what ever burning things was there is just a man hunched over in the last row. Another blink and he dissolves away into the congregation.

Lantom closes his mouth and goes back to his sermon, swallowing through something that is not fear because priests cannot fear miracles.

Monday

Foggy looks up from his bare desk to see Matt leaning in his doorway, looking morbid but very pretty in a threadbare funeral suit. He’s never actually seen Matt outside of Claire’s apartment and it stuns him. He knows that Matt goes out, even if it is only to go to church, but seeing him like this is different. The burnished late summer sun is not kind or tender. It drags along his skin revealing the yellow ghosts of bruises and paints with heavy strokes the memory of gauntness into the hollows of his checks.

“I was wondering if I could monopolize your lunch break?” Matt says with a soft smile.

“Hell, you could” says Foggy before remembering that Matt is a capital C Christian, “Uh sorry. I just meant that I don’t have anything left do to all day. As you can see, I’m gesturing to my completely empty desk by the way, I am simply drowning in things that need doing.”

“It won’t take that long I just a lawyer to go to the bank with me.” Matt says faux casually like he wants to slip it by Foggy, despite the fact that Foggy is the lawyer in question.

He’s ‘looking’ away guiltily when foggy stops and stares at him. “You know I’m not a money lawyer, I’m a criminal laywer right?”

“I thought all lawyers were money lawyers,” Matt says deadpan, almost like he means it.

“Does this look like the lap of luxury to you, man?” 

“I mean it does have a certain style.” Matt snaps back and then there is laughter in the air. Foggy’s and Matt’s giggles mingling there in the stuffy office. Foggy laughs normally he thinks, with just the right amount of ugliness to make it real. Matt laughs like bells. Not bright and shiny ones, that tinkle and sing, but old church bells that creak and ring. He laughs like old parchment cracking. He laughs like he hasn’t laughed in a long time. Foggy is glad that Karen is off doing whatever it is that Karen does that she doesn’t want him to know about because that laugh is just his to hold on to.

“Sorry,” says Matt eventually, “I don’t really need a lawyer per se, but I’m going to be signing some documents and I want somebody to read the fine print for me. They don’t exactly print deeds in braille.”

“You afraid they’re going to try and pull one over on the blind guy?”

“It would not be the first time.” Matt sighs.

 

**Ben Ulrich’s Office**

“It was an angel.” Karen says with absolute certainty.

“I can’t print that it was an angel, Ms. Page.” Ulrich says.

“It’s a journalist’s job to write the truth, is it not?” She says. Ulrich feels very old when he looks at her. She is very bright in the dimness of the office, very clean. He aches just watching the way she moves lightly, heavier now than the weeks before, but still a feather to his ancient stone. He just wants to rest, to moss over, to lay in Doris’s arms and sleep, but here she is in his office.

“Are you a religious woman Ms. Page?” He asks, a buzzing suspicion tugging at his thoughts.

“No,” She snaps, then quieter, “I do not pray to God. I have not attended mass for many, many years. I am not a bible freak,” she spits, “if that’s what you think. I saw him, the angel. I saw his wings. I saw him _burn_ the shape of his hands into my attacker’s flesh. I’m not crazy you saw the marks he left too.”

But he cannot see that she’s added a set of rosaries to the assorted items that litter the bottom of her purse. Green and silver beads with a heavy iron cross. She can hear them clink just slightly when she pulls her bag against her. That she’s prayed more than once in the last week. Not out of any sort of faith, not out of any sort of devotion. She merely hoped that he might be able to hear her thank him for Foggy and Matt and Claire. She prays so that she can ask him to help her give them every last drop of what they deserve for what they did to her, what they have made her into.

“Okay,” Ben sighs, “say he’s an angel. One angel does not a conspiracy make.”

“There’s also hush money,” she says, and that shuts him up.

 

**The Bank**

“So you’re the son.” The Lawyer says to Matt when he walks into the room. “I’ll be damned,” he adds, “never thought I‘d see the day. Never even knew that the bastard had a kid, but I’d recognize that broken nose and scowl anywhere. Twenty years this building’s been in trust, what’s kept you?”

“I have had other duties that needed to be fulfilled, but I find myself with ample free time these days.” Matt says. His face screws up a little as he says it, as if he is admitting that he’s failed.

“Well, it’s good to see you anyway. All you have to do is sign these papers and the building is yours.”

“Will you give me and my associate a minute,” Matt says to the man. The Lawyer narrows his eyes at them. He might have been like Foggy once, young and idealistic. The shadow of that still exists in him, but it is barely recognizable anymore. Whatever fire burned in his chest is gone now obscured by an oily film of suspicion and thousand frozen miles of fatigue. He once dreamed of championing the poor, but now he watches over the inheritances of mob bosses and street fighters. He just wants them to sign the papers and leave, remove the building in question from his dwindling pile of probate cases. It will make him lighter, freer. This story is etched into The Lawyer as clearly as Foggy’s love or Claire’s practicality is etched into them.

Matt takes pity on him, “It will just be five minutes. All I want is for him to read the things to me, I like to know what I am signing.” He offers the words like olive branches and the old Lawyer accepts them.

“I’ll go get a coffee. You boys want anything?”

“No,” says Matt and hands the papers to Foggy.

The paperwork is fairly straight forward and exactly what is says on the tin. One document is a simple transfer of ownership of the 51st Street gym to one Matthew Murdock. The next is merely a formality, signing it says that Matt is who he says he is. The last is an agreement to close the legal case surrounding the last will a testament of one Jack Murdock. 

Jack Murdock. Jack Murdock. Jack Murdock.

Rattling Jack.

The name strikes Foggy in the heart and makes him let out a small gasp.

“You’re Rattling Jack Murdock’s son?” He says incredulous.

Matt’s face goes all crumpled again, and all the calm capability he seemed to show in front of The Lawyer went away. “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“Dude, I didn’t know he had a son!” Foggy says again, he knows what he is saying is wrong but he cannot stop it from spilling out of him, bubbly and bright.

“Neither did he.” Matt sighs leaving the words bastard, orphan, fatherless, waste go unsaid but nonetheless heard.

Foggy swallows, “He was my hero. All those guys bigger and stronger than him and he still kept going. I stayed up to watch him fight, just once or twice ‘cause I was so young. But the posters were always around you know and I rooted for him even when I wasn’t watching.”

“I know,” says Matt, “I know.”

 

**Back Then**

Angels weren’t meant to be shaken. They weren’t made to have any uncertainty in them. They were creatures made from faith and love and glory bound together into sinews and feathers and burning golden blood. There is no room for fear inside them.

And yet Mahiel, laying on the edge of Jack Murdock’s bed, feels something pool inside his cavernous chest. Something cool and horrid, slimy and foreign. That something is Murdock’s voice, pleading.

“I’ll be yours. I’ll loose for you. I’ll fight for you. I’ll do anything you want me to do, just let me have the gym, let me keep it.”

Murdock shakes with the words still, hours after they have been spoken. Mahiel shakes too. He will mark this shared moment, his many feathered wings wrapped around a human body wrecked and aching, as the beginning of the end for him. But perhaps that was long before, when he had watched Jack Murdock, age 11, learn to shape a fist and wished that his charge had not been born fighting. He had stretched his many jointed limbs across the 51st street gym. He had not touched, had not shielded, but Lord had wished he could.

Murdock had sold his soul to that gym, and then sold his body for it. And Mahiel, who could have reduced a whole block to ash, did nothing. There was to be no interference only comfort and small gifts.

“And yet, I am so angry for you,” said Mahiel to the sleeping man, and the devil won.

 

**The Gym**

 “What are are you going to do with it?” Foggy asks, having agreed to see the gym which was Matt’s inheritance.

“I think I’m going to reopen it,” Matt says.

“What?” Foggy splutters.

Matt sighs and turns the red lenses of his glasses on Foggy. They glint in the light like tiny pools of blood made vertical. “I thought it would be nice for the kids around here to have some one to teach them how to defend themselves.”

“Defend themselves…” Foggy splutters, again. 

“Is this because I’m blind?” Matt sighs. The corners of his moth turn into a minute frown. “I’m perfectly capable of teaching people, I assure you.”

“No,” says Foggy, honestly, “just teaching kids to defend themselves? To fight? Really?”

It is the smallest of motions. Matt moves his head just a fraction of an inch. He looks Foggy over, looks into him like he has been dissected and his heart bared. Foggy knows Matt is blind yet the weight of his sight, of his calculating appraisal staggers Foggy so that he struggles to breath. He is scared of the tensely coiled something that strains beneath Matt’s skin. He is scared for a blinding moment, scared of Matt, scared of Matt from next door who is dying and who cries on fire escapes.

It passes. Matt slouches a little, the tension going out of his spine, and he is the sickly neighbor again. Foggy puts a hand on Matt’s shoulder and feels how beneath his suit he is sticky and feverish.

 “Just do we really need more people fighting around here?” Foggy asks.

“Sometimes I think we might.” Matt answers with a soft voice. He pulls away from Foggy, listing as he moves like a damaged ship at sea, and stumbles forward till he slumps against the edge of the boxing ring that dominates the space.

“Who taught the avengers to fight?” Foggy asks him.

Matt opens his mouth and Foggy can see what’s about to come of of it.

“I’m not talking about Thor ‘probably taught by fucking elves in the back of a cave’ Odinson. He’s standing straight now, looking Matt in the eyes even if it is a useless gesture. It till makes it easy to give his word weight. He might stumble through his conversations with Matt at other times, on other topics such as illness and religion and parentage, but he is firm on this. “I don’t mean Iron Man or the Hulk either. They do everything out in the open, you can’t fuckin’ miss them. But the Black Widow and Hawkeye, who taught them to fight?”

“Their spy trainers I presume,” Matt says with a wry smile.

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.” Foggy lets the Columbia Law tone slip out of his voice, lets it soften and crack. He wants Matt to understand. “Who taught them when to fight? Who taught them what’s right and wrong? Who taught them about morality and due process? When they are out in the field doing secret things who makes the calls? When faced with a man who they think is a threat, who they could kill in an instant, what are they thinking about? Are they thinking about the law? Are they acting out of fear? I’m not saying what they do doesn’t keep us safe. They certainly saved all our asses in the invasion a few months back, but these are questions I want to be able to answer, Matt. I don’t trust anybody who says they uphold the law but will not work in the light. Not even god’s law.”

His hands shake against his thighs as he speaks. His whole body trembles.

“Are you going to teach these kids how to call a lawyer? Are you going to teach them when not to punch? Are you going to teach them the fine line between self defense and aggression? Are you going to teach them not to think of their own fear when they fight? Are you going to teach them how to know when they have the upper hand? Are you going to teach them justice? Are you going to teach them mercy, Matt?”

Foggy had grown very close to Matt during his speech, unconsciously stepping forward with each question. Their toes touch. Matt grimaces at Foggy over the breach between them, which is simultaneously infinite and miniscule. His lips pull back to reveal teeth that look an awful lot sharper than they should. Foggy doesn’t notice, he is too busy searching Matt’s face for answer to whether the expression is an angry one or a pained one. He looks for a line in the sand just to see if he had crossed it. The discolored mirrors of Matt’s glasses give nothing away.

Matt looks away, the expression dropping away.

“Foggy,” he says slowly, and Foggy knows he’s fucked it up, “mercy is all well and good. But some of us had childhoods where mercy was a luxury and a fist could have done a whole lot of good.”

 

**Monday, Still**

Foggy lies on his couch and bemoans his big mouth.

See the thing is, Foggy can see the best in people. It’s what makes him a good defense lawyer. It’s like even in the most hardened criminals their virtues are just floating there like lotus flowers on the surface of them ready to be tended or expounded upon. Foggy’s always been bad at seeing the worst in things or in people; it’s a character flaw. It’s what makes him a shitty prosecutor.

He looked at Matt and he didn’t see the muck and the grime at the bottom of the lake. He looked and he hadn’t seen, hadn’t guessed, hadn’t thought. He just hadn’t thought. God, why hadn’t he thought?

He’d left the gym in a rush after that, scared of putting his foot in his mouth even worse than he already had. Foggy believes in every thing he said. He’d go to the supreme court and say it there if he had too, god help him, but Matt had turned his head away and Foggy had crumpled a little.

Foggy had left with out saying anything, but he turned just as he had reached the door and looked back. For an interminable moment the light shone at a perfect angle through the window and Matt’s skin became transparent. Inside in translucent bottle glass of his flesh, pressing up against the boundaries of him was a multi legged, feathered thing. It opened its many, many eyes. It looked at Foggy, and he was immolated.

He’d recovered from that though, made it to the office in time to actually meet a client, and now he’s lying on his couch and thinking about the fact that he probably just lost Matt and with him Claire.

He finds that the crumpling he experienced earlier was not a singular event but a process that he is still experiencing, in slow motion. its not even about _whatever_ it was that he had seen through the window pain of Matt’s jaundice skin. It cannot be because monsters like that, inhuman monsters as opposed to human ones, are not real, or at least he can’t let himself think that they are real.

The shrinking feeling in his gut is instead grief. Partially his own over Matt. Matt who sitting on the island of the boxing ring might have been as lost to Foggy as if he had been ship wrecked on an actual island. The rest was a sympathetic grief which he had not previously known himself capable of. It was a singing, aching nervous system response to something in the tilt of Matt’s head and the tense angle of his hands. Foggy had not known him long but he reacted instinctually to Matt as if they had grown up together always at each other’s sides.

Foggy just really wants to throw up.

Somebody knocks at the door. Foggy thinks sluggishly that it must be Karen because she’s his only friend. He gets up and walk to the door happy at least that now he can stop being directionless miserable and start being miserable at Karen.

It’s not Karen. It’s a drab looking Matt. “They sent,” he pauses, and then amends, “Karen and Claire sent me to get you. They are making dinner. Well, Karen is making dinner and Claire was accusing me of moping.”

“Were you moping?” foggy said before he could stop himself.

Matt made a face which Foggy understood to be a yes.

 

**Late at Night when even the City is Dark**

The girls sit on the floor their legs tangled. Karen’s hair curtains their faces as they lean together. Claire laughs softly as if she doesn’t want anyone to hear it. As the night has progressed the angles between them have become increasingly conspiratorial. Foggy wants to be suspicious of their low murmured plans but mostly he just feels warm.

Matt had fallen asleep two hours ago with his head in Foggy’s lap. The unexpected closeness, the sudden resonating of their breaths, was as foreign to the morning’s distance as birds were to storms. Where the might have been an ocean now there were only atoms.

Foggy lays a hand gingerly on Matt’s head and discovers the warmth he feels is quite literal.

“Claire,” Foggy says panicked, “he’s burning up. Do we need to call the hospital?”

He looks down at Matt who does not look well precisely but no worse than he ever did, maybe even better.  The darkness did wonders for Matt. He did not look well, but the harshest signs of his, of his whatever it was, receded into shadows. He looked like a man who might wear good suits instead of sweatshirts, a man Foggy might have met elsewhere.

“He always has a fever.” Claire says very dryly, “I’ve tried everything to get chase it out, but it only comes back. Let him sleep and it will go away a little. If he wakes up try and give him some Tylenol, he probably won’t take it but try anyway.”

“Okay,” Foggy said swallowing; being up this late gave him fits of emotion, and right then Matts head on his lap was filling him with something he had no name for. This sort of untranslatable emotion was happening more and more these days.

Claire gets up from where she had sprawled. “I’m going to get Karen some of my pajamas,” she says and drags a not unwilling Karen out of the room behind her.

The moment they leave the small living room Matt says “She’s right you know.”

“Right about what?”

Matt’s eyes are still closed, but he’s turned his head towards Foggy anyway.

“I won’t take the Tylenol.”

“Oh,” says Foggy.       `

“Your very gold tonight, its beautiful,” Matt says clearly already half asleep again.

“Oh,” says Foggy again.

This is his life now he guesses, being scared of plots hatched by two frankly terrifying women, going to work, arguing ethics with the sons of his childhood heroes. Watching those mislaid sons sleep and burn brightly on ratty couches in previously antagonistic neighbor’s apartments. Having friends.


End file.
